Hey. I'm Mitchell Davis, a Laravel developer.
Gavin Tye:I'm Gavin Ty, cofounder of Six Sides. You do sales marketing, apparently, whatever.
Mitchell Davis:And we are building 6Sides.co. It's an events platform that helps you build a stronger community through events. And this is our b to b SaaS journey. How's it going, Gav?
Gavin Tye:Good day, mate. How's it going? Good to see you.
Mitchell Davis:It's good to see you too. It's good to see you, mate. We're up to episode five. Now, if I recall correctly, you're gonna get these recordings up onto YouTube now that we're at episode five, right?
Gavin Tye:Yeah, that's right. It's enough of a buffer to withstand us going on holidays, the holiday period, you know? So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. We'll start putting these episodes up. We're going to do them pretty raw.
Gavin Tye:Right? So, and you know, maybe pull some shorts out of some interesting conversations, but yeah, that's my, that's on my to do list this week. I've almost done the graphics for it.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Awesome. Can't wait to see it. Well, it's a good point to kick us off. Let's do a week in review.
Mitchell Davis:So how's your week been? What have you been up to?
Gavin Tye:Look, I think it's been really good. So we're in March now, the March, we're starting to have more pointed conversations with, with some clients and, we've got four pretty good opportunities that we're, that we're discussing. And, they're coming from our network or an immediate connection to our network. And some are really exciting. And, yeah, it's really it's really, comforting or reassuring to know that people are seeing our, our intention of what we're trying to achieve.
Gavin Tye:Right. The why behind we're building six sides. So yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It's resonating with people. Right? Like we were on a call the other day. I reckon that's the most fun I've seen you have on like any sales call six sides or anything else that I've seen you on before. And yeah, just connecting.
Mitchell Davis:The message was really connecting really well with the person we were speaking with and it was great. We're getting really good feedback and like some real tangible opportunities. Things are moving along, which is just awesome.
Gavin Tye:I agree. Well, I think the challenge in my experience in selling software is and anything really, if it always goes back to the Simon Sinek video for me, start with the why. You know, you've got your why, how, what. Most people will talk about how how this is how we do something. This is how we help deliver an event, or this is what we do during, an event or through the app, whatever, if we were to talk about that.
Gavin Tye:I think that has very limited, ability to connect with people. But when you talk about why you wanna do something or why it's really important and why that is a focus of us and why they should pay attention to it. If you get the why right and it resonates, then in my opinion and from what I feel, resonates on a subconscious level that then makes everything else make sense. And that's what I think happened in that particular meeting with Tracy and Holly the other day is they got it. We didn't even have to do anything.
Gavin Tye:And they were like, yeah, I get it. It's a massive problem.
Mitchell Davis:And that, yeah, it was awesome to see. It's really cool. Like, yeah, it's just really like enjoyable to sit and watch as not the person doing the sales pitch. You weren't even necessarily doing a sales pitch. We're just having like an open conversation about, hey, this is what we do.
Mitchell Davis:This is how it benefits, you know, all the different sides of a community and they just got it. And yeah, it was really, really nice to see. So hopefully there's a lot more of those conversations in the future. I
Gavin Tye:think that's where the being mission driven, I know that sounds wanky or jargon filled, right? But if you have your mission right, and what you, and that permeates into your values, and I would think that the culture you and I are trying to like lay the foundations for with six sides, we're mission driven. Our mission is to help build a stronger community, all sides of a community, no matter who they are, give them unique value. And then if we're honest and intentional about that, then I think people either agree with it or don't agree with it. That's fine.
Gavin Tye:But yeah, that's, and I think that's one of the hardest things is to communicate that mission or the inherent feeling that you're trying to achieve.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah. Well, it went really well on that call. So hopefully that keeps happening. Has brought
Gavin Tye:I was going say it has brought up another conversation that's come from there, which is which we'll talk about a little bit later is at the moment we are sales led driven, like founder led driven. Right? And and that's okay. But it's probably not enough for us to scale or start growing over time exponentially, whichever one talks about hockey stick growth, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So one of the things which is where we've talked about this is our theory on how do we turn $1 into $5, or how do we do that through technology with what you're building?
Gavin Tye:And although it's if it's founder led and it's sales led driven to get us in there, that's fine if we can turn that $1 into 5. It it will be a perpetual perpetually growing machine because that one will turn into 5, which will turn into 25, which will turn into $1.25 and so on and so on and so on. So, yeah, I think that's a real interesting challenge that as a founder thinking about that, because although I have ideas on it, at the end of the day, it's up. You've got to build it. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Well, on on that point, I have spent a fair bit of time this week and Chris, who works with me at Atlas Software, my my other business. We both spent a good chunk this week building out a new feature.
Mitchell Davis:And so that's been really exciting because it has been the first new feature basically since October, November last year. Probably the last thing I did was wrap videos for LariCon Australia in November. And then kind of since then, it's mostly been you doing, you know, of course, I've been involved in 80% of everything that we're doing, but that's all really been driven by you. And so finally, the stars aligned and I was able to, you know, pull my finger out basically and get in and build out some new functionality. And it felt fucking great, to be honest with you, really good.
Mitchell Davis:So to not be dragging the chain a bit, you know, it's been really inspiring. I'll talk about it in a minute. But it's been really inspiring to like, oh, this is it's a fun code base to work in. It's really interesting technology. It's largely for the nerds.
Mitchell Davis:It's largely API driven because this is a project. It's not running in a web browser. It's running on a mobile app. So having to build out APIs for everything as opposed to, you know, form requests and tables and stuff and HTML, like like,
Gavin Tye:okay, you're going to have to go back to your mate for the layman's terms. Let's go back to the beginning here because I have no idea what you're saying. So let's go, give us an overview at a snapshot of what your specialty is. Like, I know it's Laravel, but why Laravel are the other options and keep it to a grade five level who knows, who doesn't know programming. Right.
Gavin Tye:So, cause yeah, tell me your mindset and let me understand what you think when you do this stuff.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. I will try. That's a nice, very open question. Let me start with why Laravel first. What is Laravel?
Mitchell Davis:I guess is, it's a PHP framework. PHP is a programming language. And for people that are just completely not technical at all, don't even know what that is, it's kind of like real, like normal spoken or written languages, like English versus Chinese versus Spanish or whatever. And so you can write code in these different programming languages, and one of them is PHP, and that is where I have specialized. I got started with it now probably like fifteen years ago, maybe more.
Mitchell Davis:I was only a kid. I would have been 12 maybe when I first got started writing code. And yeah, pretty quickly got on to PHP because it was a really easy language to get up and running with. Didn't require a lot of, like, complicated setup and stuff. You kind of just pick it up and get going and do, like, some really powerful things with.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. And so then fast forward to probably ten ish years ago now, somewhere around there, is when I got started with Laravel. Laravel is a framework which the point of a framework is to sit on top of the bare minimums that a language gives you, like PHP. A framework will give you a bunch of things out of the box, basically.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:So, like, okay. It'll give you some code that you can call and really quickly, like, now you're working with a database. You're able to store information about users or about talks at a conference or whatever. Like, you can store that somewhere and then pull it back out later. Laravel will help you do that really easily.
Mitchell Davis:It'll help you build out web pages where, okay, now take information about that user's name and stick it up the top right on their dashboard so they know that we know who they are and that they're logged in and all that sort of thing. It helps you with all of that. Sure. So that's kind of the overview there. And it does a million other things for the people that know.
Mitchell Davis:It does a lot more than that. But that's kind of it in a nutshell. Okay. And so then, so
Gavin Tye:when I see people or founders start a business, right, and they're doing an MVP, it looks like they choose a programming language or maybe a framework or a, or something that is doesn't sustain them when their business grows and you find them having to rewrite the code base or do something like that. Does Laravel help circumvent that or prevent that from happening in the future or is it Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Laravel is like one of the most like incredible frameworks that I've seen. And I am biased. I'm totally in the Laravel community. Right? But it has so much stuff and has been running for so long and has such great documentation.
Mitchell Davis:It's, like, incredibly powerful what you can do in Laravel over some other frameworks or or even other programming languages, you know, like a a really common one is React JS. So that's a a JavaScript framework. And largely it's focused on things happening in the browser. So, like, sure, it can draw out you can make really beautiful web pages with it. Right?
Mitchell Davis:It's the main premise. And you can click buttons and things can happen and stuff. But up until fairly recently, that was basically all you could do. You couldn't, like, send an email from it, or you couldn't store stuff in a database. You could you know, like, actual stuff that needs to happen.
Mitchell Davis:And that kind of umbrella term for that is like back end stuff. React up until recently didn't have a story for that. And so to get back to your question of, well, how does Laravel help you not have to rewrite this thing in a few years' time as your team grows or whatever, in Laravel you can do all of that. And Laravel works with these front end technologies like React or Vue, which is what we kind of specialize in. But it really helps you with all of that because it's got so much stuff kind of built in.
Mitchell Davis:Plus, there's this enormous community of open source developers that put out all of these additional tools on top of it. And we're leveraging a bunch of those for six sides and for our other projects under Atlas. So like this, it's a huge community. If you build your project right, you won't have to rebuild it in a few years in some other tool. There are lots and lots of companies that are using Laravel in different parts of their stack.
Mitchell Davis:I think there's a major business, Titan, in America. They're a Laravel agency. They put together this list of enterprise businesses that are using Laravel to really kind of showcase this point of, like, Laravel is fucking awesome to build out your your technology, build out your applications, etcetera. So I'll link that in the show notes. So it's incredibly powerful, and that's why as soon as I saw it and really started using it ten odd years ago, not once have I considered moving anywhere else because it's just, it does everything that we need.
Mitchell Davis:So side,
Gavin Tye:no, you run Atlas software, which is a Laravel agency. So if there's anyone listening here and they want some advice on it by all means, reach out to you or if you need help developing stuff. Right. So, and by the way, this podcast is sponsored by Atlas software. That wasn't Yes.
Gavin Tye:It is. Question. So yeah. Okay. Because it's such a dark not a dark thing.
Gavin Tye:It's might as well be another language. I have no idea. Right? Yep. And it's but it's more
Mitchell Davis:That's why you need people like me.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. And yeah. What we I think we need each other. Right? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
Gavin Tye:But it's, yeah, it's an interesting, I don't get that much of an insight into how you do your work and maybe we need to change that. Right? Maybe because you come into some sales meetings and, you may not see everything that's going on under the surface, but you definitely get a sense of what I'm about. I only see the end result of the platform and not the actual how you go into it. Maybe we need to maybe we need
Mitchell Davis:to to change that, but you have continued to be like, it's boring. It's nerdy. I don't give a shit. Yeah. Whatever.
Mitchell Davis:So you change change your perspective. I would love to bring you along and show you some more of how the sausage is made so that we end up with a better product at the end. I would love that.
Gavin Tye:A %. Okay. Well, let's do it. We'll figure out how to do that. Awesome.
Gavin Tye:So So back to
Mitchell Davis:the meeting bookings.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. Like, I've seen how you design. You have an eye for design. Right?
Gavin Tye:So what goes into your process for designing? Like, are you I can share what the meeting bookings, what we're our intention is there. And then I'd love to know how you go about the process of design.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. Okay. Let's do it. So the feature is meeting bookings. So from within the event app for six sides for whatever event we're running it on, as long as the event organizer has configured it and made it available.
Mitchell Davis:And what I mean there specific let's get specific. So this feature allows attendees, speakers, sponsors, whoever's at the event to go into the app, find someone else that they want to have a meeting with. So hey, Gav, I want to have a chat with you. Let's work together on our sales, I want to become a client of sales market fit. Also sponsored by sales market fit, haven't tie, reach out to him.
Mitchell Davis:He's an amazing sales and marketing expert. I got you. So if I wanted to meet with Gavin, then I could go to Gavin's profile inside of the app. There'll be a book a meeting button, and then that will bring up a screen. This is what we've worked on all this week, it'll bring up a screen where I can punch in, hey, Gav, I'd love to have a chat with you about SaaS, you know, or whatever, right?
Mitchell Davis:You punch in a reason for the meeting, you go and select from a few available times. And those times are configured by the event organizer.
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:in the lead up to the event, they will log into six sides where they'll, you know, upload their attendees and things like that. They'll just go in there, there'll be a section for meetings. And then they can say, okay, we've got, you know, 10 tables that we're going to make available from nine to five across all three days of the conference or something like that.
Gavin Tye:Right?
Mitchell Davis:Yep. And the meeting organizer will also specify the meeting times are going be ten minutes long, or fifteen minutes long, you know, they might have a sense of how long their community might need, you know, is it like speed dating, like a five minute thing? Or should we set meetings as half an hour, you know, sure, that's kind of up to them. Once they've done that, that's effectively it for the event organ organizers. So now we get back into the app.
Gavin Tye:Go on. I was gonna say that it really ties back into our mission of bringing the community closer together, right? For those who want to meet.
Mitchell Davis:So absolutely. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And breaking the ice. So this falls again in line with yeah, interesting.
Mitchell Davis:A %. So trying to like optimize for people's like ROI on the conference ticket that they bought, you know, then if they can take meetings there and now we can facilitate that inside of the app instead of them having to reach out on Telegram or or on LinkedIn or whatever. Hey, you know, are you free at, you know, 09:30 tomorrow? Maybe we can find a room somewhere in the venue or whatever. Like, we're just doing all straight inside of the app, make life really easy for for everyone.
Mitchell Davis:And hopefully, a lot more meetings will happen as a result of it. Right? So Yeah. Yeah. So then basically, you go through, you select some times, and we we've put a bunch of logic in there to make sure we're not, like, over committing any tables.
Mitchell Davis:So, you know, if there's three tables or whatever and all three of those get taken for 9AM to 09:30, then now that drops out of being an available time slot for everyone else. You know? Yep. So, yeah, we've gone through, we can now book a meeting inside of the app. I'm working on the push notifications for it to then go out to the person that's been invited for the meeting.
Mitchell Davis:So working on that, and then you can view it in like a list of meetings screen as well. So you can go in and see these are all your meetings. The part that's still to be done is to be able to actually respond to a meeting. Sure. So this I'm hoping to get done today.
Gavin Tye:Will we collate that at the end to say to the event organizer, hey, during your event you had 35 meetings booked, right? Yep. Something like that.
Mitchell Davis:Exactly. Yeah. So we'll, we'll have all of that data to be able to report on because we found from a lot of these calls that we're having with potential customers that a lot of them have, like, reporting needs, you know, they need to report to up higher in their chain of, hey, yeah, this is how many people we had. This is how much business we think this conference has generated, especially in like government space. It sounds like that's pretty common pretty, yeah, like that's required in a lot of cases.
Mitchell Davis:So as we're building out any new functionality or looking at what we already have, we're thinking a lot about, okay, how can we collate this into a, you know, a couple page report that goes through and just does half the job for them? Know?
Gavin Tye:I wonder, here's the thing. I wonder at the end of a meeting, like an Uber ride, you can rate the meeting. And then what is the best thing that come out of the meeting? What was the best thing about the meeting? Oh, we have a meeting scheduled next week or we're working on a collaboration.
Gavin Tye:So we can collate that because the intangible stuff is the harder. Any event organizers go, I know there's value, we just can't capture it. It's hard to capture, which is what we're we have our ideas on that. But I wonder if you could do that to say, hey, it was a five star meeting or four star. And at the end, they could say, hey, you had 35 meetings, five stars.
Gavin Tye:These are some of the things that come out of
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. I wonder you wouldn't necessarily wanna show like if you if I thought, oh, Gavin was awesome. And you thought, oh, Mitch is a dickhead.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. That's
Mitchell Davis:a Maybe we don't wanna show those to each other.
Gavin Tye:It's not Airbnb. Like, I'm gonna give you a rating before you see mine. Like, it's it's very subjective. So
Mitchell Davis:yeah. For sure. But but totally, we could do that. I mean, it's one extra data point, which would be interesting to see the quality of those meetings change over time, you know? Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Maybe that's not even a reflection of us. We're not involved in the meeting itself. We're just facilitating it, right?
Gavin Tye:We're providing connection and gathering the result. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then we can come up with strategies later to help people improve that result if they need to, or we're pointing the event organizers to say, hey, Mitch and Gab had a good meeting.
Gavin Tye:I might follow-up them in a couple of months and go, hey, Mitch, you know, you met with Gav at the conference. What what came of that? Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I like that. Yeah. Okay.
Mitchell Davis:You keep creating new tasks for me though, mate. I've noticed that with you.
Gavin Tye:Mate, It's what it is. It's never ending. Right?
Mitchell Davis:No. That's right. We'll be doing this for a while, I think. So it's good. It's exciting.
Gavin Tye:Anyway I think if we run our skin, that's a really good point there. Whereas I could come up with ideas left, right, and center. But then if you go like, we talked about this before is making sure we get an ROI or an intention of how we would use that feature to facilitate an outcome or to align to our mission or who who does that rating go to in the side of the community? Who does it benefit? And at the end, because I know event organizers, I did a lot of that in my head just without speaking to you.
Gavin Tye:Right? And I know event organizers, like we're meeting with Zoe today. Yep. I know that they would find that valuable because it points them to a direction of going, Hey, right? And then it's proving a value of an ROI that they can, we can, because we're gonna do reporting at the end that can go into that report.
Gavin Tye:So Yeah. Yeah. But it's a good skin to say, hey, who does that benefit? How will we generate an ROI or how will we prove the value of that feature, which I think is really important here.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're onto something. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Anyway, back to the the technical side of things. So it has been really fun to build out more APIs. Like, to be honest with you, that's the sort of thing that I love. And I could explain what that is. So an API is it's a way to do what's a good way to explain it?
Mitchell Davis:An API is, like, a a way for another system. So in this case, our mobile app to speak to the the back end of six sides where all the data is and all the push notifications are and all of that. It's it's a way for the app or for, you know, we might have a partner that we integrate with or whatever. It's a way for them to talk to our system in code, basically, in as opposed to are you looking at what it is? Application programming interface.
Gavin Tye:I'm trying to do that.
Mitchell Davis:I'm trying to It's like, it doesn't really explain it. So that's why I was like I know what I
Gavin Tye:know what the API does just from Yeah. In general. Right? So Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. As opposed to a web page where you're clicking on buttons and you're doing stuff there and you're typing things in, it all happens just through code, basically. So building those out is like, I find it really fun. Okay. Something like I've considered even giving a talk on before because it's like, this is this is where the real fun happens because it's just like raw computers talking to each other and making stuff Riveting.
Mitchell Davis:Absolutely. See, this is where you've got a bad attitude. You need to we need to change that attitude. Anyway, so that's been really fun to work on and to build out new things like that. And then it once that was in place, it became really quick and easy to add this to the mobile app because it's like, well, everything that I need is already here.
Mitchell Davis:It's right here. Just got to use it. So that was really fun. So now I guess.
Gavin Tye:So so with that, so we've mainly been you and I speaking about them that the app of six sides, but there's a whole back end. And so does that back end, you take the data from the app, goes to the back end, and then we present that back eventually to a client facing portal or something like that. Right? So it's the data. Yep.
Gavin Tye:Okay.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. Exactly. So there'll be a there is already a website, but we we haven't shared it with anyone. The like, the dashboard, which is what event organizers and speakers and sponsors and maybe even attendees will actually be able to log into and like see their data and for event organizers, they'll be able to go change everything. That's talking to the same database as what the app is talking to via these APIs.
Mitchell Davis:Sure. Just different ways to get access to that same data, and everything's all in sync.
Gavin Tye:Okay. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Brilliant. So yes. So that's kind of how the different parts of the, like, the interfaces work. But where was I going with this? The oh, the design.
Mitchell Davis:You asked specifically about design. Right? So as far as designing a feature, so your was your question more about like the visual design of how do I think about what Yeah. Yeah. Sure.
Gavin Tye:So we have been on this topic for about twenty minutes just as an FYI. I'm sure people are dropping off.
Mitchell Davis:The people are along for the ride. No, that's all right. The real heads get it, I think. Anyway, so the yeah, the way I kind of think about screens has largely been informed by looking at a bunch of websites over years or different apps and things like that. Start if you're a developer and you're trying to start thinking about design and how can I make my stuff not look like shit?
Mitchell Davis:And to be clear, I'm not saying I'm the best designer. I am far from it. Right? And I I accept that But I know I'm a little further along the chain than someone who just doesn't give a shit about how their stuff looks at all. I'm not like that.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. So it's been informed by just, like, look at websites, look at look at apps, and don't just, like, gloss over. Oh, yeah. Cool. There's a button there.
Mitchell Davis:Look at the button and think about, like, okay. They made it this curved this much or, like, the text is bold and it's it's this like try and think through just really look at how stuff's been built in front of you because you'll be able to pick up on a lot of cues. Then the guys at Tailwind Labs who they've made this amazing design framework called Tailwind CSS. I'm sure anyone that's developer y has heard of it. It's now like the kind of the de facto standard for how to build the design part of your website, Gab.
Mitchell Davis:So they released this book probably like five plus years ago now called Refactoring UI, and it's like exactly this. It is a really good book for taking a developer minded person and trying to get them to pivot into being a bit more design minded. So it talks through about, like, okay, add space between your buttons so that things aren't cramped together and, like, think about the boldness of the text and stuff. So that was like that was a shift for me going from, like, I would like to be better at design to now. I understand it a bit more, and I can start to use some of these things.
Mitchell Davis:Every now and again, I'll still refer back to that book to just kind of get some ideas on things. Otherwise, I'm like I'm looking at, like, Dribbble, you know, which is this, like, big design website, which, like, designers, professional designers will upload their designs to to try and find more work and things like that, and it just gets showcased. So I can link to that in the show notes as well. But that's really helpful because you can just search for and I did. I literally did that for this.
Mitchell Davis:I looked up like meeting bookings on Dribbble, and then found they've got like this mobile section or something like that. And then you can kind of see, okay, these are different meeting booking interfaces on phones. Turns out, I didn't really like any of the ones that I found. So, I haven't actually used those, in in any of the designs here. But it's it's good to kind of try and get your brain in the right spot for, oh, this is roughly what it should have.
Mitchell Davis:These are all the different elements that need to be on the screen, you know.
Gavin Tye:I'm sure it's good to see what you don't like. Right? Yeah. So, yeah.
Mitchell Davis:It's helpful. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Okay. And you're looking at Drible now with that's with a triple b
Mitchell Davis:for people who
Gavin Tye:may be listening. So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:Okay. So that's kind of it. There's no like rhyme or reason. I'm not really like sit down and put stuff in wireframes or even in Figma and stuff. I was speaking with another agency owner, and they're, like, they're big on that.
Mitchell Davis:They sit down and do wireframes and put mock ups together and stuff. And he was explaining, like, it's really helpful because it then gets you, like, 50% of the work is done just in the design phase. Yep. But often for the projects that we're working on or internally here, like, we're we're trying to do everything as lean and mean as we can still deliver a really great product. But, like, we're not spending a bunch of time.
Mitchell Davis:Like, this meeting booking thing, we basically got it finished in under a week. And if we had have been doing full on design iterations and things like that or engaging with a, like, a designer to do this, it would have taken a month, you know?
Gavin Tye:So this is That was the timeframe comes from is bringing other people in and stuff.
Mitchell Davis:It can. And like, I could have sat down in Figma and figured it out and taken, you know, build up all this stuff and hey, Gabe, do you think of this? And then maybe we show it to Zoe and Yeah. But it's like, I could just get in and just build this thing in code. I can actually write it, and then we can have a look at it and make changes there.
Mitchell Davis:And that to me feels a lot quicker. So for some projects, it's it's better, especially if there's, a big budget on a project, way better to do a full design with a designer, get them to mock everything up first and run through, like, okay, this is what happens when a user presses this button and then it should do that. And you have all of that in your designs. It's it is way better, but it costs a lot You
Gavin Tye:know? But I think it's necessary. I think it's necessary when you have thousands or hundreds of hundreds of thousands of people who might be affected by it. You just can't go and change stuff willy nilly
Mitchell Davis:if you get it So
Gavin Tye:yeah, I can see that there comes a time because it's more risk reduction exercise opposed to a productive exercise. Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:That is a part of it for sure. There's lots of benefits to sitting down and like putting together these like placeholder screens and stuff. There's, there are lots more benefits than what we've talked about here, but I know that like, I put together the app originally for LaraCon Australia. Right? I wasn't sitting there designing everything up in advance.
Mitchell Davis:Like, my style, my personal style is a lot more just let's just get into it and kind of I'm okay. Yeah. A little bit, you know, with respect of the client if we're it's a client project or thinking about the end user and making sure this thing doesn't suck. Right? I still run a filter over the top of everything that we produce to make sure that it's solid.
Mitchell Davis:Product. But I don't find that I personally need to sit down and design it out first before I even think about the code versus Chris, who works with me at Atlas, he's very much like, hand me a completed, like, a fully scoped ticket, you know, is the terminology that that we use. That's more his thing. He wants to know everything up front. And I'm like, being the, you know, originally, like, freelancer to then now agency owner, I'm like, I'm thinking about the entire stack the whole time.
Mitchell Davis:You can't like, you could throw anything at me at any point, and I'm like, oh, yeah. Cool. Okay. We just change that, and we'll do this here. And then now that Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:You know? And ultimately it's fine. So yes, it is a bit loosey goosey. Oh. As long as I make it clear that like it still comes with quality.
Mitchell Davis:I'm just okay kind of working in the chaos, you
Gavin Tye:know? Yeah. Okay. And I wonder that that has to come with that, that will evolve eventually, right? Cause sooner or later you will, all things going well and we're growing and we're like, we're adding others.
Gavin Tye:You just can't give people free rein because they're not going to align with your mental, your mental vision or our vision. Right. So we have to put checks and balances in place. Yep. But I also wonder if people would like, they take funding and they prematurely jump to that because that's what they think they should do.
Gavin Tye:And that slows things down and it just wastes money. So there must be a balance there.
Mitchell Davis:Think so. Yeah. And I mean, if we ever go down that road, yeah, we're going to have to figure that out. Right.
Gavin Tye:But
Mitchell Davis:for now I'm really enjoying like, just this is us. We're lean and mean. We're we're building quality. To be clear, we are building quality, but it's like, it's fun. It's really nice just being in a small team.
Mitchell Davis:It's you and me, Chris occasionally helping, like, and we smashed this thing out of the park in in a week. You know? So I'm really pleased with how quickly we're able to iterate. And it's inspiring to make me want to do more of this. It's like, yep, okay, we've got a laundry list of, you know, 10 different things that we want to build and seeing how quickly this one was able to come together.
Mitchell Davis:And I'm like, okay, I'm kind of jumping at the bit here to do more.
Gavin Tye:So you've got a feature feedback session today with someone on our advisory council, which were loosely set up. So it'll be, yeah, hopefully that'll go positive today. Yeah, cool. So another question I have, are we finished with this topic Or as riveting as it is, I let's move on. But I will commit to learning Laravel, like, to something.
Gavin Tye:Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:You don't have to learn the code, but we could sit in together, and I think that would be a huge waste of your time. But we could sit in together and I could show you like, hey, this is how I'm building out something and get your thoughts in as I'm building it on the screen.
Gavin Tye:You know? So let me be clear. I'll learn how to spell Larabelle.
Mitchell Davis:Alright. That's what you meant. Got it. So
Gavin Tye:another question is, cause I'm coming up against this at the moment with me is juggling priorities against like with my other business and an event and six sides. Sorry, I'm still stuck on the other name. How do prioritize? Cause I know my core business, like I've got clients that do that stuff, but if we get a win on Six Sides, like I'm naturally drawn to doing the fun shit and like the positive stories. I'm like, yeah, yeah, like I'm happy to, and I'm like, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
Gavin Tye:I've got to go back.
Mitchell Davis:You've to pay the bills.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Got to pay the bills. Yeah. So how do you, do you have that challenge as well?
Mitchell Davis:It's tricky. Like the fact that it's taken me this long, like we've now been working together on this four months, three, four months, somewhere around there. Oh, and aside that we we've totally haven't brought up is we finally registered the company this week. We got the we got the six sides proprietary limited. So it's happened.
Mitchell Davis:We got it. We were real worried because there's some other six sides consulting or, you know, whatever, some other things that have that, like, prefix. And we were real worried that we weren't gonna get it, but we got it. So that's that's a a big win for us. We should celebrate that.
Mitchell Davis:Yep. We're we need to set up a bank account. I'm waiting on Gavin who I believe is gonna go today. But yes.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Yeah. We're going today. We're going camping today with the family. We're having I can't wait actually after we finish this.
Gavin Tye:I've got to do a couple more things for us, and then we're going camping, but we're stopping past the bank to get all that done today.
Mitchell Davis:Very good. Well, I'm excited. We'll have a bank account. We'll be legit. I'm I'm looking forward to it.
Mitchell Davis:So anyway, so back to juggling. I I will say, like, I felt bad about how long it has taken me to get started on building new functionality out because, like, I have been involved in a lot of these calls. And I know you've been doing a ton of work on your side to kind of move us along, but I have been more focused on my other businesses. A lot of that is like Atlas stuff working for clients, but also I'm involved in some other things. We don't have to get into it.
Mitchell Davis:So that's taken a lot more of my time. But again, like that has made me feel kind of shitty and like I'm doing a disservice to you.
Gavin Tye:I don't think that at all. I don't know why you would think that. Right? Like you've yeah. I think you've spent whatever the time last year building this and then you've got priorities.
Gavin Tye:I don't think there's any sense on building something until we get confirmation that a client will find it valuable at this point in time.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Okay. Well, that's, that's absolutely
Gavin Tye:not like, I don't think,
Mitchell Davis:yeah, it's But it is now time for me to focus more on this so that we can continue to grow the product and and win some more some more business. Right? So Yep. Yeah. So it's funny because now I'm, like, really excited about it.
Mitchell Davis:I'm feeling those same of how you just described just before of like, oh, I really want to work on six sides and like, you know, set up more meetings and things like that. And for me, it's building more stuff. But, yes, I I don't think I'm at any risk at the moment of, like, not paying enough attention to my other businesses. I I don't think that's the case at all. If we continue to get some wins on the board, I think that it'll start to, it might start to get to that point.
Mitchell Davis:But I think we're a little while off that. And then, yeah, we'll have to figure out what does the future hold, know, as we continue to scale, which is an exciting proposition to talk about. Yeah, we're not there yet. So I'm enjoying the amount of time that I'm now putting into this in terms of development and like even the meetings, every meeting that I'm having that you're largely making happen. It's fun.
Mitchell Davis:It's still really fun, you know, for me to sit in on. It has
Gavin Tye:to be. I think it has to be in early days. If it's not fun, why would you do it? Like people say stressful and blah, blah, blah, yeah, but gotta be fun. Fun first.
Gavin Tye:Well, sorry for me, I'm wired to have fun. If it's not fun, I will lose interest.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Well, like, it was I meant what I said about that the meeting that we had the other day. You look like you're having a ball and it was just making me, I was like really enjoying that meeting, just kind of fly on the wall. And I spoke like a little bit through the call, you know, myself, and I talk a little bit about the backstory and all of that. And then for some of the kind technical parts, I'm happy to jump in and answer any questions or things like that.
Mitchell Davis:But yeah, just kind of seeing you in your element, like it's, that's really enjoyable, you know? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:I think part of that, I thought about that a bit. And in the early days we are well early days, it's getting your store like people, if anyone here is thinking about founder led sales or anything like that, right? It's, as soon as you go in and they sniff that you're trying to sell, they would just withdraw and won't talk to you anymore. And, because no one likes to be sold to, it's a fundamental first principle that I live by, particularly now we've transitioned to more online sales because it cut since COVID, right? Yeah.
Gavin Tye:If you, if they get a sense that you're trying to sell, just go and have a look at lead gen emails that you get. People just push too quick and you're like, oh, leaves a bad taste. And it's contradictory with trying to build community and bring, build connection. If you try to sell, that's an inverse of that, it can be perceived. So getting our story right, that relates to value and relates to mission has been something that I've been trying to work on every single time.
Gavin Tye:Like, I'll go away and go, did that resonate? Did that? Like, what about Mitch's story? It goes really well. What can we evolve?
Gavin Tye:How can I leverage that? How can I position you to be the subject matter expert of the platform? And I think it really resonated for the first time with me, with those people earlier in the week. And, but one, I could have just got lucky and swung at the fence and just got lucky. Right?
Gavin Tye:It's not about the one is a good indicator that needs to happen every single time. I feel like we're getting close. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Gavin Tye:We'll get there
Mitchell Davis:for sure. It's it's fascinating to me. This is like the the inverse, but you're like, yeah, I went away and I thought about this, and I'm thinking constantly thinking about how can I change the That's like the yeah? Riveting gav. That's so, like, so cool to hear.
Mitchell Davis:But I'm actually interested. Meanwhile, you think I'm boring as fuck. So not fair.
Gavin Tye:No. I know. I don't think you're boring. I think I think programming languages are boring, but anyway.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah, right.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. But I've been thinking about that too. Like it's a real risk for either of us is to just put blind faith in the other one without actually having oversight because you hear it all the time I think where people put too much faith in someone and all of a sudden they get swindled out of something. And I don't think we're ever going to get swindled, but we also just going, hey, putting blind faith in a sales process or development and end up going, hey mate, I've made a bad mistake. I shouldn't have done this.
Gavin Tye:Look at least have it being involved in that. Because I've been thinking about AI and how that might play a role in this business, not not in necessarily development, but how we would interact with a client or or a customer or they would might interact with theirs. And I'm also thinking about it with, like, my other business, Sales Market Fit. I'm like, I know nothing about that. How do I know that who I'm speaking to knows what they're talking about?
Gavin Tye:Yeah. I was heading down a path and I'm still going down a path with this company and I was on blind faith. And was like, hang on a sec. I haven't seen anything that they've done. I almost said yes to something.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. And I was like, hang on, I better slow down a bit and just have a look of what they've done. I've since brought in someone that I know that is really passionate about AI and knows a lot more. And I've asked him, does he want to help me just get my head around it and sit in on a scoping session and discovery sessions just to get another set of ears so I'm actually not being led down a path because I'm suspecting with any new technology or any new buzzword, there are people who are honest, would like to think the majority are honest, but there's people who might fall within the gray area there. But yeah, it's getting across each other I think is really, at least to a degree, right?
Mitchell Davis:Well, I feel like we are incredibly open and honest with each other. Like you and I have had some harder conversations and it's been great. Like every time I come away from it and it's not, I'm not just like talking you up for the sake of it, but yeah, you do. Are gonna cry?
Gavin Tye:No. No. I'm not gonna cry. Come on.
Mitchell Davis:Do it. It'll be good. I would love to be able to, like wouldn't that be just a bay what a superpower to, like, actors have that they could just, like, yeah. Okay. I'm just gonna cry now.
Mitchell Davis:You could totally use that to manipulate other people. Anyway, yes, I I'm very pleased with how open you and I, our communication is. Like, we we continue to work on I called you a boomer this week, I think. Correct. That's right.
Mitchell Davis:Was that this week? Yeah. Because because yeah. Because and you're not. I don't think you're in it.
Mitchell Davis:I don't know what the boomer age range is. You're not a boomer, but you were like Yeah. Every now and then you just write like, okay. To, like, if I'm, you know, sending through something and
Gavin Tye:But they're 61 to 79 years old. I'm not a boomer.
Mitchell Davis:Well, you know, I don't know. Anyway yeah. And I thought I so I called that out. I was like, dude, this is mad boomer. What you're doing every time you write okay, and then she'd said you've said okay a lot more.
Mitchell Davis:So Yeah. Probably I've done it to myself here.
Gavin Tye:I'm also in other meetings, and then I'm just I wanna leave you hanging. I'm like, yeah. Okay. I'm trying to pay attention.
Mitchell Davis:I'd rather be left hanging than hit with an okay. Especially, like, o, the two letter version. Okay. It's maybe a little better if it's like, okay, a y. There's there's levels to this stuff, and I think about this sort of thing all the time.
Mitchell Davis:But This
Gavin Tye:is riveting. This is riveting.
Mitchell Davis:Give a shit about this.
Gavin Tye:No. That's it. Yeah. No, it's good. Look, I think honestly, in my experience where there's founders who there's tension or something, things go unresolved, right?
Gavin Tye:I don't.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah.
Gavin Tye:And I've learned that in just my personal relationship, like before my wife, like, you know, if you're not honest and I've learned to be honest as hard as it can And if the other person can't handle that, then I just don't think that's the right relationship, you know? Yes, we've had some interesting conversations and, but they're needed, right? Like understanding why each of us think the way we do and there's a like why we're behaving the way we are so we can interpret it and change out how we are doing things. So we're not adding to it or not getting affected by it, I think is really important. So, yep.
Gavin Tye:Anyway. We're on
Mitchell Davis:the right track. It's
Gavin Tye:really cool. Next week coming up, mate. So we could end it there, but what are you working on the rest of the app, the functionality next week? You've got a client call today, hopefully a potential client call today. Yes.
Gavin Tye:Fingers crossed. That will be enough for them to go, yep, we're in.
Mitchell Davis:Fingers crossed. You've asked me to, to give the final, to close the deal, which I take on the task at hand. I can do this. I've got
Gavin Tye:the Yeah.
Mitchell Davis:How are you gonna do the sales gap.
Gavin Tye:We'll Yeah. In the access code base.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Yeah. I would love to see that. You would not have a damn clue. Anyway, yes, I do have this demo call to go through this meeting booking functionality.
Mitchell Davis:I'm hoping that we'll get, some really great feedback and just see, you know, is this on the right track as far as this person is thinking? And yeah, if it happens to also lead to a, yep, we've got you, then amazing. That's today. And I'm gonna finish off because the meeting booking isn't finished. Like I mentioned, still need to like set up notifications and be able to respond to meetings and stuff.
Mitchell Davis:But it's like 90% there. The hard work is done. Yep. So I'm gonna finish that off today slash Monday, probably. And then ideally next week, I would love to be working more on chat.
Mitchell Davis:So facilitating messaging between different attendees inside of the app as well. We know that not every event will want to use that. Specifically, like LaraCon Australia last year, we didn't have any sort of chat, know, we still don't at this point, but we didn't have anything like this. The Laravel community across all the different conferences just seems to prefer using Telegram, which is a messaging app. And that works really well.
Mitchell Davis:So if people are happy to just use other groups, then great. They can use that. But we'd like to have this in place for any events where they're not using some other system like that. Sure. So, yeah, so that's kind of coming up.
Mitchell Davis:I don't know if that will be complete next week because, you know, we're continuing to just evolve and scope out different things. And other things get in the way as well. Like this week worked particularly well, excuse me, to be able to get in and like build out this feature from scratch and effectively finish it. But there's no guarantee that next week will be that same opportunity. Other things might get in the way.
Mitchell Davis:So, yeah, but that's the rough goal for me is to try and get chat in place next week.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. For me, we we don't have any sales meetings or whatever coming up next week. I was just having a look after we do.
Gavin Tye:So
Mitchell Davis:That's our first week in this year, I think.
Gavin Tye:Yeah. There's a bit of a delay. We've got three in two days next week. Right. But so next week there's a couple of things I want to do on my side, which is around mapping the market out.
Gavin Tye:And I might do a little bit of that next week and then because I haven't done any lead gen. Everything's first degree networks and stuff. So we might start just putting the feelers out there and then coming up with, yeah, just doing some outreach. We've got a bit of a customer ideal buying persona at the moment, across a couple of the businesses that we're talking to. So seeing if I seeing if I can replicate that and then we will we could even use the you know, I'm setting up a lead gen agency a little bit at the moment.
Gavin Tye:We can maybe divert a bit of his time to that. So we'll see. We'll start. I'll be hesitant to do that because one, we don't have the capability and we're still trying to figure stuff out. But we just might do a little bit of it.
Gavin Tye:And then we also, one big thing we need to do is we need to plan a time to catch up in person for a couple of days over a weekend or something. We still need to lock that in, but
Mitchell Davis:want to do a founder's retreat.
Gavin Tye:A founder's retreat down at Kandygan.
Mitchell Davis:Yeah. Maybe. At the RSL club. Yeah. The
Gavin Tye:Mate, loving the conversation as always, and I'm enjoying this journey. We are making progress. I look forward to being able to talk to people about when we actually sign our first client, we're really now we're trying to get our shareholders agreement and our terms and conditions and all that ready, our bank account set up with the anticipation that a couple of these clients are going to say yes in a few weeks, we want to invoice them straight away. Right? Yeah, absolutely.
Mitchell Davis:Get things going. Me too. I'm loving it. It's really exciting. And I just, every, yeah, every week I'm like, man, I made the
Gavin Tye:right call with getting you
Mitchell Davis:to join me on this because there's so much stuff that I
Gavin Tye:just What do people do when they go?
Mitchell Davis:So
Gavin Tye:again, like if anyone, we have a website, we have an email address, right? If anyone wants to have any questions or if they have any comments, is it journey6eyes dot co?
Mitchell Davis:It is. Yeah. And it's in the show notes as well. We would love if you'd leave us a review. We're up to how many countries did we say?
Mitchell Davis:Was it 12 countries now? 12. Very exciting. 12 different countries have had people listen to us so far. So hopefully we'll continue to grow that.
Mitchell Davis:Leave us a review, rating. There'll be links to everything we talked about in here. You can find us both on LinkedIn if that's your jam, you can find me on Blue Sky. Mate, I think that's it. Why don't we call it there?
Mitchell Davis:We'll catch everybody next week.
Gavin Tye:All right. See you, mate.
Mitchell Davis:Cool. See you.
